Wooden Fish Songs

Wooden Fish Songs

(Excerpts)

SUM JUI

Toishan, China

1842-1870

On the long walk into town, the fields stretching out on either side of the footpath and the clusters of gray brick houses looked much the same as those in Lung On.But it was my first time out of the village since coming as a bride, and beneath my concern for Gim Gong, I felt the excitement of a New Year morning.

Gim Gong had written that the section of First City in Gold Mountain[2] reserved for our people was very much like Toi Sing.And the streets and shops were every bit as full of people and noise and smells as he’d described.

The market crackled with the same loud heat as strings of firecrackers.I was accustomed to peddlers who carried all their goods in the two baskets at either end of their poles.In those days, a whole moon would sometimes pass without any coming through the village.There were never more than one or two at a time.A few clack-clacks of their bamboo rattles would set dogs and children into a frantic round of barking and shouting.Hnnnh, before a peddler had a chance to cry out what he had to sell, half the village would be crowded around him, giving him their whole attention.

In Toi Sing my head spun like a child’s top, and still I could not see all the kettles and pots and crocks and toys and bolts of cloth spilling out of the stores.But my need to see foreign ghosts for myself, to determine how we might protect Gim Gong from the ones in Gold Mountain,overrode my desire to linger.Hurrying after Hok Yee, I pressed through the crowded streets without stopping until we reached the worship hall.

The foreign ghosts, a giant of a man and a big-boned woman, were as ugly as I’d expected, their behavior more barbaric.Mounting a raised platform, the ghost man called for silence, then shouted and howled,flinging his arms and twisting his body so furiously that his unhealthy white skin soon blotched red.Sweat poured from him.Yet he did not have the sense to take off his jacket or loosen the sash tied peculiarly around his neck instead of his waist.

I was not surprised.From what I could understand of his broken Chinese, he was denouncing our Gods, even Gwoon Yum, the tenderhearted Goddess of Mercy, praising the foreign-ghost God, the one who’d murdered his own son.Clearly the ghost man had lost his reason.Could Gim Gong, living among them, have lost his as well?

Then, just as suddenly as the ghost man had started his ranting, he fell silent, nodded at the ghost woman.Immediately she began making strange music by pounding and pumping a large boxlike instrument with her fingers and feet.Her lips moved, so I guessed she was singing, but I could hear no voice.

“Louder,” someone called out.

“How can she sing louder?” the woman beside me snorted.“She’s bound her waist so tight it’s a wonder she can breathe, let alone sing!”

“Yes,” I heard someone else say.“She has to be carried everywhere in a sedan chair like a bound-foot woman.”

“But her husband speaks out against foot binding.”

“What husband?”“That ghost man, of course.Who else?”

Listening to the buzz of talk around me, I realized that many of the people had been to the worship hall before, some more than once.

“Watching these ghosts is like going to the theater,” the woman behind me laughed.

In opera, however, the colors painted on the actors’ faces clearly reveal heroes and rogues.From the chatter I was picking up, these foreign ghosts, white as any villain, were confusing.Though they’d come to live among us, they were keeping their own clothes and customs, rudely rebuking us for ours.Yet they’d also opened a free school and regularly gave away medicine to the sick.

Were they perhaps a little crazed but sincere in doing good? Or were they devils working out some evil design? Not knowing for certain,mothers covered the faces of their babies and ordered their children to hide when the foreign ghosts finished their worship and came near.

If only Hok Yee and I could have protected our son as easily.But separated from Gim Gong by sea and mountains, we could not hide him.And he refused either to return to Fourth Brother or to come home.

FANNY

North Adams, Massachusetts

1875-1877

As the depression[3] deepened， manufacturers reduced hours and wages so that even laborers lucky enough to have employment were earning less than a dollar a day.Unemployed men and women crowded our streets； there were so many poor the work farm could not accommodate them， the lockup had to be turned into a temporary shelter.

Father’s store lost most of its customers.Lue could not meet his obligations to his family or his landlady except by borrowing from his countrymen.Where Father stormed, however, Lue stayed cheerful: the fewer hours of labor Mr.Sampson offered his operators, the more time Lue had for experimenting and study; and since Mr.Sampson had promised to restore wages as soon as there was an improvement in trade, Lue was confident he would be able to repay his mounting debts.

Only when his father lost his land did worry weigh Lue down so that even in the greenhouse his step lost its bounce, his face its happy glow.Determined to ease his burden, I turned to Father the very hour after Lue was baptized and begged permission for the boy to board with us.That way he could send home what he was giving to his landlady or he could borrow a little less.

Father, as I’d feared, stormed that his losses were too severe.But Lue’s need gave me courage, and instead of cowering in retreat, I pressed my claim, I persuaded Phoebe to throw her influence to my support.

When we finally won Father’s approval, I would have cheered had it not been Sunday.Lue, moving into the room adjoining mine, danced up the stairs with his belongings.Laughing, he slapped the backs of the Chinamen who were helping him and tickled their ears.

The Chinamen showed none of Lue’s relief or joy.And when we were alone, Lue reluctantly admitted that they considered his decision to live with us a betrayal.Indeed, they charged him with rejecting his people and being overly ambitious, of aspiring to a society and grade in life to which he’d not been born.

What would they say, I wondered, if they knew the full extent of my aspirations for Lue?

All the first-generation fruit from crossing the wild berry and raspberry had been ugly.Undaunted, Lue and I had laid our heads together and discussed the qualities of each fruit, the traits they suggested, any curious habits we’d observed.

How my heart beat quicker, Lue’s breath grew unequal, while he was harvesting seeds from the berries we’d agreed were best.And, oh, the flutters of expectation as we looked for new seedlings.Tears were audible in Lue’s voice when he had to weed out the weak from the strong.But nursing timid sprouts into bold, bearing vines, he chirped and trilled like a skylark.

The canes and leaves were dark, the flowers pale, and when Lue took their pollen for crossing with the first-generation bushes, I felt as if he were gathering stardust from moons in a night sky.Watching the fruit grow,Lue’s eyes flashed pleasure at their beauty.Their taste, however, turned the smiles that wreathed our faces into grimaces.

So we started anew, discussing each berry, culling seeds, and raising new seedlings.Only, now, with Lue a member of our household, we no longer had to abandon our discussions just as crude, undigested ideas were taking shape.We could—and did—talk late into the night, then rise at dawn to talk some more, to check the progress of a promising seedling or fruit.

Lue’s memory was a marvel.He needed no written records, keeping the progress of each plant in his head.Moreover, he seemed to have an ability not only to observe the most minute characters in a seedling but to match them with those that would likely appear in the next generation.If Lue was to develop and hone these God-given gifts, however, I would have to free him from any labor except with plants.

Having no means of my own, I planned to secure his freedom through Father—by convincing him to pay Lue for the gardening the boy was doing without compensation.Of course, I could not approach Father until a revival in trade allowed him to redeem the losses he’d been incurring.But the minute the red ink in Father’s ledgers turned black, I’d take up the cudgels for Lue and win his freedom.

Just thinking about it made my heart quicken.Faith, I began building air castles in which Lue was not only free but already winning acclaim for extraordinary horticultural feats.“When did you first know you were nurturing genius?” people would ask.In answer I would show them the photograph Lue and I had taken to commemorate his baptism, the one with me seated and Lue standing behind, one hand resting trustingly on my shoulder.I would point out the boy’s youth, the pride visible in the set of my lips, my chin.“Even then,” I would say.“Even then.”

And so real to me were these air castles that I never once gave thought to what would happen if the manufacturers again broke their pledge.

With the long-awaited revival in trade, four-wheeled carts began rattling across our brick pavements, hauling raw materials and manufactured goods between the depot and factories.Stacks belched black smoke from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, sometimes later, and there was the constant hum of machinery.But there was no rise in the laborers’ pay, and outraged union leaders called for work stoppages at all the factories.

Lue burst into the parlor with the news.“The Chinese are joining the Crispins in a walkout at Mr.Sampson’s.The vote was unanimous.”

Taken by surprise, I bolted upright on the chaise where I’d been resting and said stupidly, “Walkout? Unanimous? But Mr.Sampson and Father are good friends.”

Lue cocked his head to one side.“Pardon?”

Breathing deeply in a desperate effort to remain calm, I explained, “If you go out on strike, Father will be furious.You’re his guest.He’ll feel you’ve betrayed his trust, his hospitality.He’ll turn you out.”

“Laborers are the ones who’ve been betrayed,” Lue came back hotly.“How are we supposed to live?”

“You don’t need to worry, you have a home here.”

“I have debts.And my family needs more money.Besides, the strike will fail unless we stand united.”

Fear for Lue and my plan made me blunt.“The strike will fail regardless.”

“No.”

“Wait,” I said, holding up my hand.“Listen to me.Yes, Mr.Sampson has been unfair.Yes, the reasons for the strike are good.But the same was true for the strike you and your countrymen were instrumental in breaking.”

Lue bristled.“We didn’t know.”

“That’s my point.The French Canadians that Mr.Sampson brought in to break an earlier strike didn’t know either.Mr.Sampson even got them to sign pledges never to join a union.But every one of them ended up a Crispin.They were the ones at the station trying to keep you out.Did they succeed? No.Now you and your countrymen are joining them, but you can’t win either.Because Mr.Sampson and the rest of the manufacturers are too powerful.”

“Maybe,” Lue conceded.“But shouldn’t we at least try?”

“Let the others try, not you.”

“I’ve already given my word.I’ll explain to Mr.Burlingame.He’ll understand ....” Lue paled, broke off.I knew why.He’d been around Father long enough to know that for him the strike would be like a red rag shaken before an angry bull.He would not understand.He would turn Lue out, forbid him access to the garden and greenhouse.

Lue turned, looked out the window at the greenhouse.The fruit from the last cross had come up a lovely salmon color and had a sweet,translucent pulp, and we’d been talking of developing a cherry currant by crossing currant and grape pollen.

“You’re my teacher,” he said.“What should I do?”

I trembled at the responsibility he put on me, but I would not shirk it.Crossing the room, I stood beside him.“Keep your promise to go on strike.Just say nothing about it to anyone and refuse to picket.That way Father won’t know.He won’t expect you to go to the factory as a scab.It’s too dangerous.”

FANNY

North Adams, Massachusetts

1877

The town’s manufacturers, determined to drive the unions out of North Adams, replaced the strikers with newly arrived immigrants from Europe willing to work for less.The manufacturers also combined to refuse employment to strikers at any of the factories.

Lue, with Father’s support, could easily have persuaded Mr.Sampson that he had not been on strike.But then he would have revealed his duplicity to the Crispins.As it was, his countrymen had seen through his excuses for not picketing, his strained silences when Father spoke out against the strikes, and they abused Lue as cruelly as if they were Phoebe’s cats tormenting a trapped mouse: those who were leaving North Adams demanded Lue repay his debts; the few who were remaining turned him away when he asked to join them in the small groceries and laundries they were starting.

Even before the strike, the Chinamen had been warped in their minds against Lue—first for leaving their colony, then for cutting off his queue.No, not that exactly, for Lue was not alone in residing outside the tenements on Brooklyn Street where most of the Chinamen boarded, only in making his home among the captains of industry; likewise, he was not alone in dispensing with his queue, only in his reasoning, the manner in which he’d done it.

He had, Lue confided, tried to persuade his countrymen that they should all cut their queues, not because they would not be returning to China but as a symbolic declaration of independence from feudalism.Reminding them of the suffragist who had bobbed her hair in the park while reciting the Declaration of Rights for Women published by the National Women’s Suffrage Association, he’d urged, “We can do the same.All of us together.But in place of the Declaration, we should have a constitution for establishing a Chinese Republic.”

The older men accused Lue of treason, the younger of exhibitionism.Nevertheless, with the same high-hearted courage with which he’d stood up to our pastor, Lue pursued his own course: he drew up principles for a form of government modeled mainly after that of America, boldly read the document out to passersby on Main Street, then cut his queue in one swift stroke of the knife.

I led the small crowd gathered around him in warm applause.But for weeks afterward his countrymen berated Lue for confounding conceit for self-respect.How they had reviled him! Yet he had held his head high and defended his actions hotly.Now he hung his head and pleated his lips.If he made confidences, they were to his journal.

At night, long after I had turned off the gas in my room, light from Lue’s streaked under his door and across my floor; I would fall asleep to the scratch of his pen.In the morning, he came to breakfast wan and heavy-eyed.

“You are not dependent on your countrymen,” I comforted.“You’re educated.You can secure more suitable employment than they can offer.”

Lue, at nineteen, was familiar with the best poets and writers of criticism.He could solve different problems in mathematics and had a more than competent view of history, a good foundation in chemistry.Moreover, he had a dignity in his demeanor and a consideration for the feelings of others that reflected a maturity well beyond his years.Since he’d cut his queue, he hardly looked like a Chinaman.Faith, if he was not a gentleman, I did not know one.Still he found every door closed to him.

Phoebe declared the sum of these rejections a sign from God.“Remember the slave whose freedom our congregation purchased?” she asked me brightly.

Turning to Lue, she explained how that Negro, a man of letters, had also been unable to find employment, so he had joined a missionary society, which had sent him to Africa to save the heathen.“This must be God’s will for you as well,” she concluded.“It’s Mr.DeWitt’s prophecy coming to pass.Look at how many of the Chinamen are making plans to go home.”

“No,” I wanted to cry.“No.” But Phoebe’s proposal had shaken my nerves too severely, and no voice came.Dumbly I gripped the arms of my chair.

Lue, scarcely more calm than I, chafed in his seat by the window.“The Chinese are leaving because they can’t find work and because it’s too risky to start over elsewhere ....”

Afraid he would upset Phoebe if he said any more, I forced out a faint but sharp, “My sister knows that.”

Lue reddened, looked down at his feet.Phoebe, riffling through the stack of newspapers in the far corner of the parlor, made no acknowledgment.But how could she not know? According to the newspapers, politicians in the West had been blaming Chinamen for the country’s hard times, and violent men were assaulting Chinese all across America, driving them out of towns.Every week I read of new atrocities.

Pulling out a paper, Phoebe showed us a passage she had marked, a passage on mission work in China: “Sons bring their fathers to Christ,husbands their wives, families their clans.Thus the Good News of the Savior’s love is passed on from mouth to mouth, from village to village,and churches have been opened in places where, a few years ago, the name of Jesus was unknown.”

Her face radiant with joy, she said, “Lue, won’t you take the Good News to your family?”

“There are souls to be saved here,” I protested.“Souls you yourself have said Lue has been instrumental in bringing to the Master.”

“Yes, but the moral debasement of pagans in China is fouler by far,”Phoebe countered.

“There are already missionaries near my village,” Lue said dully.“Nor would my family be able to feed me.The whole district is suffering from a drought, and my brother has been forced to leave home and look for work in San Francisco.”

That Lue’s inability to find work was, as Phoebe said, a sign from God I, too, came to recognize.But I believed it was a sign I should enact my plan to free Lue so he could fulfill the Almighty’s purpose by developing his God-given gifts.

Father, nearing eighty, was feeling the burden of his years.He had taken on a partner to run his store, and it was not difficult to convince him to hire Lue formally to undertake full responsibility for the garden.Only Father growled that the prolonged loss of trade had cut deeply into his capital, that taking on a partner had meant halving his income, doubling the time required for recovery, and he offered Lue a salary that was not much more than an allowance: there would be no money for either Lue’s debts or his family.

Of course I knew that when Father was in a fierce mood, it was worse than folly to take him on.Since there could be no delay, however, I plucked up heart and tried to reason with him.Surely he could not be as badly off as he claimed.Hadn’t he enjoyed years of profit before his losses?Didn’t we live among the town’s wealthiest citizens in a spacious,handsome house? Weren’t we still pleasured by snug fires and good dinners?

My questions unleashed a fury in Father such as I had never seen, and I swiftly withdrew lest he retract his offer altogether.But Phoebe could yet succeed where I had failed, and I begged her help.She refused to intervene.That way, she said, God’s will would be made manifest, not hers or mine or Lue’s.

When I told Lue, I saw in his face the same dismay I had felt when I had been forced to leave Culloden.His eyes swept the greenhouse, his little “sanitarium,” the boxes where he birthed and nursed seedlings, the bench where we sat and discussed their progress, the salmonberry bush he’d created, the jar that held the seeds he’d harvested.“Miss Fanny, how can I give up my work with you?”

How could I？ Before Lue had come into my life I had spent more days in bed than out.There was no reason to rise.My winter coughs，frequent inflammation of the lungs， and reliance on laudanum[4] had prevented any hope of useful employment.And I confess good works were for me like the charity food baskets I distributed with Phoebe： they staved off hunger for the moment but could not satisfy.

Teaching Lue, however, my rusty faculties had sharpened.Working with him on his experiments, I was at last using all the brain God had given me; I often felt the deep contentment I’d known in Culloden.Indeed,my days were so filled with joyful purpose that I no longer even felt the want of laudanum.

Certain I was carrying out God’s will, I reached up to my collar,unfastened the garnet pin Uncle John and Aunt Julia had given me on parting, and told Lue, “A short distance from Culloden, there was a school almost as fine as Uncle John’s, a school that allowed the best of their senior students to cover their board and tuition by helping out with the younger children.I could have quit my family and gone there.All I needed was train fare, train fare I could have had by selling this pin.Only, as you see, I never did sell it because it was my obligation to stay with Father and Julia and Phoebe.”

I pressed the pin into Lue’s hands.“Selling this will help you meet your obligations to your lenders.You have no other obligations except to the gifts the Almighty has bestowed on you.”

While I was speaking, Lue’s expression had turned hopeful, then eager.As his fingers started to curl over the pin, however, his face darkened, and he stared down at the garnet stones as if they were drops of blood.

“My family ...” A spasm seized his throat, and he could not continue.

At his distress, my own throat dried.But the Master held me up so I did not falter.

Fixing my eyes on his, I said, “Your family is in the hands of our Father in Heaven, not yours, and He has already guided them to send your brother to America to work in place of you.Is your faith strong enough for you to believe that, for you to trust in God and God alone?”

For a long time Lue neither spoke nor moved.Then slowly, ever so slowly, his fingers coiled over the pin.

“Yes,” he said gravely.“Pray God, yes.”

SUM JUI

Toishan, China

1877-1879

For the first time Gim Gong sent no gold eagles[5] at New Year.He was no longer at the factory but working in his ghost teacher’s garden， he wrote， and his earnings were too small， his debts too large， for him to send us any.

Yet we began the year with hope.Fourth Brother had written his wife that he was opening a store in the provincial capital, Sang Sing, and we should continue to farm his land on shares.We believed Wai Seuk,unusually blessed by Heaven, would send what was necessary to see us through to harvest.Perhaps he could even reclaim Gim Gong from that ghost teacher.

People’s destinies, however, cannot be separated from the times in which they live.Returning Gold Mountain guests said the troubles Fourth Brother had run from had grown worse: villainous foreign ghosts,determined to drive our people out of their country, were robbing them,pelting them with stones, even killing them.We received no word, no money from Wai Seuk.And Lung Wong, the Dragon King who lives in the Eastern Sea and gives us rain, sent none.

Of course we carried water up from the river.Nevertheless, many seedlings withered in the unyielding heat.Moreover, Fourth Brother’s paddies were too scattered for us to keep a constant watch on them all.As soon as we left one, some other farmer, desperate to save his own crop,would steal our water.

With no relief from the blazing sun, the soil began splitting and cracking in everyone’s fields, stunting the sweet potatoes and turnips,killing the rice.In truth, all I saw growing was Moon Ho’s belly, a sight that should have filled me with joy.But with no rain or reserves of food or money, how could I welcome another mouth?

By early summer we’d already sold our stools, table, and beds.Fourth Brother, home to fetch Fourth Sister to Sang Sing, saw how we’d taken apart all but the main room of our house.His eyes darted from the two thin quilts that served as all our furniture to the small hill of Moon Ho’s belly.And although all his capital was tied up in starting his new store, he said,“No need to pay rent this harvest.We’ll settle up in a better year.”

We were glad of his kindness.And of the handfuls of rice and dried sweet-potato slices Bik Wun and Ma slipped us when they could.But we needed more, and Hok Yee asked Lo See to write Gim Gong.

“Tell him it will be four moons before harvest, that there will probably be no harvest.Tell him we can stretch what we have on hand for less than a moon, that we have nothing of value left to sell.”

The Jesus God has promised He will provide.But He works in mysterious ways, Gim Gong replied.You must trust in Him as I do.Good will come.

Lo See, reading the letter, shook his head.Hok Yee tore it into shreds.Then we heard that the two foreign ghosts in Toi Sing were offering rice to those who entered the gates of their religion.Could this be what Gim Gong meant?

On the long walk to the worship hall in Toi Sing, heat rose up through our straw sandals, burning our feet.Hot winds carried dust from the dried-out fields high into the air, stinging our eyes, filling our parched mouths with grit.Sweat beaded our foreheads, then our backs, soaking through our thin cotton jackets and pants, clinging.Although Moon Ho,Hok Yee, and I took turns carrying Little Tiger, he grew heavier with every lei.After we told the ghost man we accepted the Jesus God, however, he marked our heads with water and gave us rice.

We wanted to go and collect rice every day.Bur the ghosts only gave it out at the end of their worship meetings, and these were held every seventh day.This day, the ghost man told us, was special, one where we should perform no labor.Why then did he choose that day to hold his meetings? Moreover, the way the ghost man leaped about on his platform and his wife pounded on her music box was anything but restful.

Hnnnh, it seemed to me the ghost man often went against his own words.First he told us his God commanded us to honor our fathers and mothers, as is proper.Then he ordered us to stop feeding our ancestors.And when Big Dumpling’s father refused him permission to enter the Jesus religion despite the gifts of rice, the ghost man directed the boy to give up his father, his family.

Explaining that the bit of bread he handed out during worship became the flesh of the Jesus God in our mouths, the ghost man warned us not to bite down or blood would spurt from it and we would be punished by the Jesus God’s father.I had not eaten meat since I was seven, and not wanting to break my vow, I slipped my piece to Little Tiger, cautioning him to take care.Too hungry to listen, he fell on it as if he were a tiger.But there was no blood when he chewed.Nor did the bread become meat.

Some men began wondering out loud if the ghost man was deceiving us deliberately because he was an agent for his country， which was not Gold Mountain， as I thought， but one that had sent soldiers to attack our people in the past and might again.[6]Others， claiming foreign-ghost eyes had the power to pierce the earth， said the ghost man intended to steal treasure out of the ground.

The ghost man insisted he and his wife had come to save us.But I had not forgotten the pig trade， [7]and it seemed to me that their gifts of rice could be a decoy， that they might be deliberately driving away the rain clouds.After all， before the drought， they had failed to convince any of our people to enter their religion.Now， because we needed their rice， we numbered in the hundreds.

The rice, so important to us, was nothing to them.Their cook said they were eating meat three times a day.He said they were wasteful: when the taste of a dish did not suit, they ordered him to make it over; they also made him throw away food that was just a little spoiled.

The amount of rice they allowed us was one bowl for each man and woman, a half bowl for a child.Even watering our allotment down into the thinnest gruel, we could not make it last the six days between worship meetings.Since the rice was unthreshed, however, we were able to grind and boil the husks for eating as well.

In truth, what we needed, what we wanted, was rain, not charity.

The number of Jesus followers swelled until the ghost man had to hold six meetings on worship day.To avoid the worst of the heat, we started out from Lung On before sunrise, attended the second meeting,then left as soon as the ghosts gave us rice.The trouble began at the end of the sixth meeting.

Though we were not there ourselves, those who were talked about it for many moons.And from what we heard, the ghosts were at the front of the worship hall handing out the last of the rice when Big Dumpling’s father rushed in, charging, “You ghosts, you devils, you told my son Jesus is the only God.”

Of course the ghost man had said that many times during every worship meeting, and the ghost woman sang songs about it too.Listening to that nonsense was part of the price we paid for the rice.Big Dumpling’s father knew that.What upset him was that his son had come to believe the foreign ghosts’ foolish talk and had smashed the Gods and the ancestral tablets on their family altar.

“Friend,” the ghost man said.“Listen to your son.”

“A father listen to a son!” Big Dumpling’s father shouted.Turning to the people gathered around, he stormed, “This ghost upsets the proper order.He teaches our sons to insult our Gods and ancestors.No wonder Lung Wong won’t send rain!”

His words acted like fire on oil.Everyone started to yell against the ghosts.

“Yes, he’s the cause of our troubles.”

“He turns Heaven and Earth upside down.”

“He’s poisoning our children.”

“His wife steals girl babies.”

“Ai yah, she bewitches them, their mothers too.”

“The ghost man cut off my brother’s leg and wouldn’t give it back.”

“He has a box of human bones.”

No one spoke for the ghost.Yet he refused to back down.“Jesus only God is.Jesus only one with power rain make.Not Dragon King.No Dragon King is!” he shouted, kindling the flames.

People outside the worship hall, hearing the disturbance, surged in,adding more fuel, and there were cries of “Kill the foreign ghosts!”

The ghost woman shrilled, “We not afraid.God with us stand!” And her husband, curling his hands into fists, shot his arms high above his head,calling on their God for help.

But it was their cook who saved them by running to the magistrate and bringing back soldiers who escorted them out of Toi Sing.

That same moon, all the villages in the district joined together in a huge procession to honor Lung Wong.At the head was Lung Wong himself, his long, scaly body borne aloft by a dozen men.Then came creatures of the sea and storms, colored banners of yellow and white to symbolize wind and water, black and green to represent clouds.

Leaping and prancing, Lung Wong circled the fields, kicking up clouds of dust that stuck to our sweaty, dirt-streaked skin and caught in our throats.His attendants sprinkled cooling water from willow branches onto us and the parched earth, crying, “Come rain, come!” Young men crashed cymbals together and beat on gongs.Elders exploded long strings of firecrackers, filling the air with shredded red wrappers, the smell of gunpowder.

Priests fed crackling hot bonfires with sacrifices of spirit money.And as the smoke from our offerings climbed up to Heaven, Teen Mo seared the sky with lightning, Lui Kung hurled thunderbolts so fierce the earth shook in deafening rumbles.Still Lung Wong refused us even one drop of rain.

With the ghosts gone, we had no rice, either.

FANNY

North Adams, Massachusetts

1877-1880

When Lue stopped sending his family remittances, their letters ceased.Since most of the Chinamen in North Adams were from his vicinity,however, he knew from them that the drought had worsened, all but destroying the district’s harvest.

For a while, a missionary couple near his village handed out relief,and many Chinese—including, praise Jesus, Lue’s parents, a sister-in-law,and a baby nephew—were baptized.Then idolaters drove the missionaries out.

“How will my family eat?” Lue fretted.

I understood his concern, but I said lightly, “Uncle John’s family often went hungry during the War of the Rebellion.When Aunt Julia had nothing to cook, the family sat at table anyway; they listened to her read recipes out loud; they gave thanks that they could eat their fill in their imaginations.And when Union soldiers burned them out of their home,leaving them without so much as one particle of food, they scoured the ground where the soldiers had picketed their horses, gathered up bits of corn which had been dropped, and ate that, all the while praising God for His mercy.”

Lue released a small, penitent sigh.“Yes, God is just even if man is not.And I do trust in Him.I do.”

The sale of my garnet pin had failed to cover all Lue owed.To pay off the Chinamen who were leaving, he had been forced to borrow more from those who stayed.Now these men began pressing Lue for repayment in the name of their families.

Once again I petitioned Father to raise Lue’s salary.But Father,confusing old losses with new, had become even more mistrustful of his circumstances.Faith, he’d come to prize his ledger as much as his Bible,and he was so implacable I might as well have been a serf entreating the czar of Russia.

Still I was hopeful that Phoebe, who delighted Father with her clever economies—saving grease to make soap, the fingers from threadbare gloves to cover cuts—could somehow wheedle him into doing right.When I turned to her for help, however, she shook her head, repeating what she’d said before, “God’s will be done.”

While telling Lue, a sick headache seized hold of me, and I buckled under its onslaught.But what was the pain from its fierce grip compared to Lue’s suffering? Praying for strength from the Master, I labored on.

“Perhaps you can repay your countrymen by helping out in their laundries and stores.I could shield your absence from Father.”

The wrinkle in Lue’s forehead deepened.“I already asked.They won’t have me.They say I should quit North Adams and seek work that will allow me to repay them and send money home.”

“We’ve been over that.Your brother can send your parents money.Maybe he already is.Your place is here.”

Lue plucked at his collar the way he used to tug at his queue.“If only God would tell me Himself that His purpose for me is here, that He wants me to stay with our work in the greenhouse.Then I could be sure.”

“God is telling you,” I assured him.“He’s speaking to you through your success with the plants.”

On Lue’s face hope rose, battled doubt.

Leaning forward, I pressed my point.“The bushes of your salmonberry are more early bearing and productive than the ordinary raspberry, and your development of a cherry currant shows promise.If you continue to develop your gifts, you have the possibility of making discoveries that may benefit many people, your people.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely.”

That same day Lue began to explore the development of new varieties that could withstand drought.Although student had by then surpassed teacher, Lue floated his every idea with me.“You help me find my way,”he said.

Together we spun vague notions into possibilities, wove possibilities into ever more concrete plans.And while we were talking—indeed, so long as we were in the greenhouse—indomitable purpose kindled Lue’s eye.Despite obstacles, he fairly glowed with confidence.He was commanding, manly, and spirited.

While he was raking or burning leaves, digging snow, splitting kindling, or polishing Father’s boots, however, Lue’s whole air changed.It was as if he’d walked from sunshine into shadow.When he thought himself alone, I would sometimes hear a pensive sigh, notice spasms of agony, doubt, even anger cross his face.And since Lue never put on airs, it could not have been the lowly nature of the chores that upset him, but the burden of his family.

My annual clothing allowance from Father was meager.But by wearing boots that leaked and making over my dresses and cloaks to cover worn spots instead of replacing them with new, I had been able to turn it over to Lue in its entirety.Had the Chinamen not forced Lue to repay them,he could have again sent these few dollars to his family.

He was, however, too honorable to deny his debtors’ claims, and since he could only meet them by turning to a usurer, my clothing allowance and every penny of Lue’s small salary—outside of what he tithed—had to go to that viper.Yet when Charlie Sing heard through a cousin that Lue’s brother had disappeared in the West and his two nephews had succumbed to starvation and his grandmother had died as well, the Chinamen placed all the blame on Lue.

Lue, head bowed, accepted their charge.His tone low, rapid, and full of pain, he recalled his grandmother’s many kindnesses: the little treats she had slipped him when he’d visited, her stout-hearted defense when he’d been expelled from school, her praise for his flower garden.“I might have saved her.I might have saved my nephews who have lived and died without my ever seeing them ....”

“We cannot save those whom God has marked for death,” I reminded softly.“Remember what I told you about my sister Julia? How she was born with God’s claim already stamped on her brow? How she went home to Jesus after five years of struggle and suffering? Yet her short life and death had purpose, for it was through Julia that I came to Jesus.”

Lue clasped his hands as if in prayer.“I know my family’s suffering has been ordered by Providence for good reason.I know that although I cannot yet see or understand what that reason is, ‘He doeth all things well.’But ...” His voice broke.“Miss Fanny, it is hard to bear.”

Touched to the heart, I confessed, “When I first came home from Culloden, I also said, ‘It is too hard, Lord.I cannot endure.’” I forced a smile of encouragement.“But with the Master’s help I did.You will, too.”

Indeed, Lue never did weep or rail but was wonderfully brave and faithful: at least twice a week he fasted in his family’s name; night after night he continued to raise the burden of their suffering to the Almighty during prayer in the parlor.

Always he would begin in a voice so low I had to strain to hear.Then slowly, in a manner that thrilled my every fiber, he would work himself up until finally he was shouting loud and sweet as an angel’s trumpet call,lifting my very soul to Heaven.

More than once Phoebe told Lue, “You have a gift for prayer that could be used in preaching.” Not a day passed that she did not ask the Almighty to help Lue see that his true work lay in China.

I dared not speak my prayer out loud.

SUM JUI

Toishan, China

1885-1888

Where did Gim Gong’s ghost go? Back inside him.No, I did not see it.Nor did Hok Yee.But what else could have happened since Gim Gong himself said, “I am filled with the Spirit.You have not taken it from me.”

Yet he seemed sound enough when asking about our orchard.Or in discussing its development, in telling us of his own work in his ghost teacher’s garden, how he had created new and better fruit.

In truth, our son’s methods were so well reasoned that sometimes,listening to him, Hok Yee would throw me looks full of pride and hope.But even as I smiled agreement, Gim Gong would say something foolish such as, “People can be improved the same way,” or, “The strength of the ghosts in Gold Mountain comes not from guns but from mixing together different peoples and new ideas.”

He claimed that unlike Wai Seuk, who had brought back a machine which benefited us alone, the beliefs and ideas he had brought would improve the lives of everyone.Hnnnh, you can’t eat ideas.Ideas won’t put clothes on your back or keep you warm on a cold day.And we had already found the Jesus God wanting, his teachings against ours.

But Gim Gong had ever gone his own way.That was how he had fallen into the rice paddy as a child and almost died.Now he seemed determined to pull us down with him.

His queue, he told us proudly, had not been cut by villains, as we supposed, but by himself.To show that he renounced the Emperor and desired a government where everyone expressed their own inner feelings and opinions.

What dangerous foolishness! If each person had his way, there would be no end of confusion and abuse.To have harmony we must have masters,and the proper order begins with a son obeying his father and honoring his ancestors.Then all else flows naturally, with the father respecting the elders of the village, the elders venerating the district magistrate, the magistrate bowing to the viceroy, and the viceroy kneeling to the Emperor,the son of Heaven.

But Gim Gong had already refused our ancestors their due.And despite his father’s warning that the Emperor had spies everywhere and men had been killed for saying less, Gim Gong insisted on his “right” to speak his mind.

As long as Gim Gong did not have the strength to rise from his bed,we were safe.Hok Yee had paid the diviner generously for his silence.Gim Gong’s voice was too weak to carry through the walls, and we kept the window in his room shuttered, the door closed.

He had few callers.Only ten when he’d left for Gold Mountain, he had been absent twenty years, and he’d never been well liked.The curious and the greedy came, of course.Elder Sister even brought over a pot of nourishing soup.

Pouring it into one of our own pots, I rinsed hers clean, placed a fat packet of lucky money inside, thanked her for her concern.Then, although every person in the village already knew that Wai Seuk, his wife, and children were gone, I repeated what I had told the callers who’d come before her, what I would say to those who followed.

“Did you know Hok Yee sent Wai Seuk, our grandchildren, and their mother to stay with Fourth Brother in Canton? Yes, Gim Gong is that ill.He cannot see anyone.”

Where the diviner had failed to rid Gim Gong of his ghost, my mother’s brews and the prescription from the Long Life Medicine Shop restored his health.Inside of a moon, his cough disappeared, his skin regained its color, his bones put on flesh, he walked with a firm step.

Laying our heads together, Hok Yee and I convinced Gim Gong that no one would ever get a chance to hear his ideas if he spoke out against the Emperor and was arrested.That he must exchange his foreign suit for our own clothes and wear a false queue or no one would trust him and children would shout him down with cries of “Mo been yun.” But we could not prevent him from acting like the foreign ghosts our people had run out of Toi Sing.

Those ghosts had lived among us for years, yet they had never really known us.How could they when the beams of conceit in their eyes were so big? Gim Gong, likewise blinded, found fault not only with our Gods but with everything we did.

As if he were a magistrate issuing proclamations, he declared that our laborers should not work longer than the span of three watches in a single day and should rest one day in seven.Instead of carrying baskets of oranges and bundles of grain on their backs or by means of poles, they should use wheelbarrows.Instead of flailing the rice to thresh it, they should use a machine.

He told mothers they should cover their babies’ bottoms with thick layers of cloth instead of split-bottomed pants.It was unhealthy, he said, to let the village dogs eat the babies’ droppings, to blow our noses with our fingers or spit into the street.

When people called Gim Gong a humbug or a trader in wind, Elder Brother and Sister would try to hide their pleasure by placing their hands over their mouths and saying soothing words.If people did not lose their tempers and treated him kindly, however, their faces would cloud over and they would cunningly prolong Gim Gong’s senseless talk by asking him to make clear some nonsense he had said, such as why it was cruel to eat dogs and cats but not chickens and pigs.

After only a few days, Gim Gong could not leave the house without being jeered at and deliberately jostled.And late into the night, I would hear him mumbling in his room.I could not understand what he was saying.Since he was on his knees, however, I guessed he was asking that Jesus God for help.Whether that God tried but was too weak to succeed,or whether he paid Gim Gong no mind, I do not know.But this I can tell you: nothing got easier for my son.

Standing on top of the wall outside the temple or on an overturned bucket by the well, Gim Gong would begin, “We are all sinners.You may not know it yet.Just as a man with a fever doesn’t know he is sick when he is delirious.All the same, he needs medicine.And so do you.Yes, you need the medicine Jesus brought us from Heaven.The medicine of faith.”

“Here,” someone would shout, throwing a clod of dirt at him.“Here’s some medicine for you.”

Others would join in, and Gim Gong would soon become splattered with mud.Still he would go on with his prattle until the baiting became too loud for him to be heard or someone knocked him down.Then, the next day, he would start right up again.

Watching him, I was reminded of how, as a child, he had stubbornly continued to stand up against the boys trapping birds even though they had chased him with sticks and made him cry.When I’d asked him why he’d persisted, he had said, “The birds need me.I have to save them.”

Now, when his father and I pleaded with him to stop his talk and work in the orange orchard instead, he shook his head sadly.“Don’t you think I want to? But I must obey God’s will, not yours, not mine.Besides,if I am silent, how can Jesus speak through me? How will you be saved?”

One afternoon, he was cornered by some village toughs.Thin Dog,who rescued Gim Gong and brought him home, told us the ruffians had pummeled and kicked him brutally.And Gim Gong’s breath caught like a sob in his throat as I rubbed salve and placed plasters on his dark bruises.Yet Thin Dog said Gim Gong had not tried to run or defend himself.He’d merely lain on the ground where he’d been thrown, not once raising his voice against his attackers.

He was, Gim Gong explained, following the teachings of that Jesus.“If we are struck on our right cheek, we should offer our left.” After he recovered sufficiently from the beating, however, he took to slipping out for walks in the early morning, before the village woke, otherwise staying indoors.

The danger from spirit creatures was even greater than that from people, of course.But Gim Gong refused to believe us.

Fear for him made me impatient.“Are you deaf? Didn’t you hear me say your own sister-in-law was attacked? And just last winter, one of the night watch almost had his breath sucked out by a fox ghost that leaped down from the eaves of his hut.Only by chance was he able to stab the creature with his stave and drive it off.”

“A Jesus follower has nothing to fear from creatures or people,” Gim Gong insisted.

“How can you say that?” Grasping our son’s wrist, Hok Yee pushed back the sleeve, revealing ugly purple weals.“Look.”

Gim Gong winced, his voice trembled.Still he maintained that he was not afraid, that he was safe with Jesus.

FANNY

DeLand, Florida

1888

From their letters， Lue and I had imagined Cynthia and William in Arcadia.[8] And DeLand did indeed possess every element a cultured or refined person could seek.Moreover， their property—a half-hour’s ride from town—was beautifully situated amid pines and oaks alive with songbirds， chattering squirrels.

Their white clapboard house, built in the southern style, was remarkably like the one Lue and I had planned for ourselves.Raised on blocks some distance from the ground, it had no cellar.Spacious verandas ran clear across the front of both floors.A breezeway separated the kitchen from the dining room.A long hallway ran through the center of the downstairs, opening on to rooms on either side.

Within, every room was bright and airy, the walls neatly plastered, the woodwork a lovely curly pine resembling burl mahogany, the whole comfortably and tastefully furnished by Cynthia and impeccably maintained by Sheba, a Negress with an air of alert patience, who served as cook.Outside, the garden and grove laid out by William was meticulously tended by Sheba’s husband, Jim.And since the rich soil and warm climate enabled the growing of everything peculiar to semitropical conditions, a stroll in any direction resembled a visit to a botanical garden or horticultural museum.

But of course perfect happiness in this weary world is not possible:without Lue, DeLand could not be Arcadia for me; and William, in spite of the vicinity’s year-round sunshine and frequent bleedings and blisterings by the doctor, was no longer on the mend but failing, losing the strength he had reclaimed and more.

Faith, the effects of William’s palsy were becoming so severe that he had difficulty in controlling his twitching sufficiently to speak.Visibly shrinking, he lacked the strength to cross even the smallest room without pausing to rest, and his left arm and leg were rapidly losing their cunning.

Cynthia, still beautiful and lively, had lost none of her eagerness for gaiety, however.

“The cordiality of the people is DeLand’s chief charm,” she had enthused the day I’d arrived.

“And th-th-they are the r-r-right s-s-s-sort of p-peo-p-ple."

As William slowly forced out each word, Cynthia smiled encouragingly, but her fingers drummed the table so impatiently that he soon abandoned the struggle, and she swiftly picked up where he’d ended.

“There’s Mr.DeLand himself; Mr.Stetson, the Pennsylvania hat manufacturer; Father’s friend, Mr.Sampson ...”

To me a list without Lue’s name could hold no interest.And in the dark mood that had possessed me since his departure, I could find no head for polite conversation, no heart for society.Although I was included in their invitations to oyster roasts, croquet parties, and formal dinners, I declined them all, preferring to occupy myself in writing letters to Lue or reading and rereading his to me; recalling our happy, tranquil hours at study and work, his many kind acts, familiar scenes.

Indeed, so vividly did Lue yet live in me, I could, when alone, enter into the make-believe that he’d not left.If I’d had the gift of prophesy,however, I would have followed William’s brave example and accepted every invitation.

I boasted of Lue’s successes to Cynthia and William: the bushes of his salmonberry were more early bearing and productive than the ordinary raspberry; his cherry currant grew on thrifty plants with dark, thick foliage;he’d also created an improved variety of tomato that resisted drought and produced large clusters of hardy fruit on vines frequently fifteen feet in length.

My creation, although I did not say it, was Lue.For Lue—wonderfully lettered, cultivated, and strong in spirit—was, it seemed to me, as much of an improved variety of Chinaman as his salmonberry,cherry currant, and tomato were of plants.

His last words to me before boarding the train had been, “Gim Gong is going back to China.Lue will stay in America with you.” What he discovered, however, was that in people, as in plants, a hybrid once created cannot be separated.In his first letter from his village, he wrote, I was foolish to think I could leave Lue behind.Lue Gim Gong is one.And, oh,Miss Fanny, he feels estranged from his people, his father and mother and brother, even himself.

I had asked Phoebe to arrange for Lue to break the long, rigorous journey back to his village with a week’s rest at a mission in Canton that her Sunday school class helped support, and its director, a Mr.Randall,had replied: Lue Gim Gong will be heartily welcome.The Devil has been making a mighty struggle against the Holy Spirit in the Chinaman’s home district, dooming every attempt by foreign missionaries to establish work there.Since he is a native, they will be more accepting of him, and he may well be God’s instrument in defeating the forces of evil there.

But Lue admitted in his letters to me that he was proving less successful than the foreign missionaries had been.The people in my village,including members of my family, vie with one another to see who can invent the best plan to vex me.The only comfort I have are your letters, the only peace I know is the hour before dawn.Then I walk the hills unmolested and pray for guidance, the strength to endure another day.

And the Master did give him strength equal to each day.But I knew from sore experience that endurance is a thin gruel.It sustains life; it does not nourish.

How I longed to help Lue.Separated by a continent and an ocean,however, I could do nothing except add my prayers to his and send words of encouragement.

Phoebe counseled patience.I have reminded Lue of how long he resisted Truth, she wrote me, and of how it was through work in the greenhouse that he developed his gift with plants.With practice, he will become more skilled at preaching.Indeed, our Father in Heaven surely foretold this through Lue’s naming by his fathers on earth and his insistence on retaining that name—Gim Gong, Double Brilliance—at baptism, for he can save his people through teaching them improvements in farming as well as winning their souls for Jesus.

But Lue confided to me that despite his best efforts he was failing at teaching, too.Miss Fanny, when I try to raise my people up as you did me,they insist their backward ways are superior.How can I help them if they refuse to listen?

Faith， the abuse those pagans heaped on Lue showed such want of feeling that my mind became occupied with every possible horror.And I could not forget that the Jews， also pagans， saved the thief Barabbas and crucified the One[9] who had come to give them life.

SUM JUI

Toishan, China

1889

Oi Ling mourned Gim Gong as a wife should.She asked what his favorite foods had been so she could send them to him in offerings.Taking no food herself, she wept day and night until her face swelled red as a radish, her eyes became small as sesame seeds, her mouth foamed, and she had no voice.

Since his body could not be found despite further searches, however,we could not give him a proper burial, proper rest.And to prevent Gim Gong’s ghost from wandering in search of a body to inhabit—as Yeh Yeh’s disturbed spirit had long ago taken possession of mine—we paid the village priest to perform special rites.

Holding a three-sided dagger with two bells on the brass handle, the priest stabbed spirits that might wish our ghost son ill.Then he set up a ceremonial tree with candles on its four leafless branches and led each of us around it in a circle while he recited prayers and the rest of the family stood back and wailed.He burned paper goods: a boat to help Gim Gong sail across to the Yellow Springs, bats to bring him good luck, a wedding bowl for marital happiness.

But people complained that protecting them from Gim Gong’s ghost was not enough, that they were still in danger.And one evening, while we were finishing our evening rice, Elder Brother led a group of men from the seven villages surrounding Lung On into our house.

They claimed to be petitioners.But their faces were black as the night outside, and they made no greeting, no attempt at courtesy.As they strode in, Moon Ho and Oi Ling backed into the kitchen with the children.Wai Seuk and Hok Yee started to rise—to do what, I don’t know.Softly I cautioned, “Beware,” and they sank back down onto their stools.

Forcing a smile, I offered wine to Elder Brother, the men crowded near.Like actors uncertain of their cues, they looked at Elder Brother for guidance.He glared a withering no at them and dismissed my offer with an arrogant wave.

Then, clearing his throat, he pushed back his sleeves, declared, “I speak for every man here,” and plunged into a lengthy tirade against Gim Gong, the Jesus God, and foreign ghosts.Blaming Hok Yee and Wai Seuk anew for bringing spirit beasts to Lung On, he accused them of disturbing the dragon who lived under our hill orchard and demanded that they remove these creatures by uprooting our trees.

With each word, I felt my breath, my life, drawn out of me.Hok Yee lost more color, becoming white as the mourning we wore.Wai Seuk reared off his stool.Hnnnh, were the men not pressed so close, he would have overturned stool and table both.

“Destroy the orchard?”

Elder Brother’s lips curled, hissed a satisfied, “Yes.”

The men squeezed inside chorused, “Yes, chop down the trees.”

Those jammed in the doorway and spilling into the alley also took up the cry.

Hok Yee gripped the table, pulled himself onto his feet.“We made peace with the dragon before we broke ground,” he shouted above the roar.“And the orchard’s success is proof of his approval ....”

Elder Brother cut him off.“The dragon is angry.That’s why he swallowed Gim Gong.”

“The watch said it was a blue fox,” Wai Seuk snapped.

“A blue fox sent by the dragon.Just like he sent the fox that attacked your wife.” Elder Brother looked over at our neighbor.“And the creature that took your son.”

“No,” I wanted to cry.“Elder Sister, the fox ghost is responsible.”

But the words choked in my throat.How could I accuse her without betraying myself?

*　*　*

Inside the Ancestral Hall we had helped build, the Council of Elders affirmed that the loss of Gim Gong to the spirit beasts proved we were to blame for their presence.They accused us of showing disrespect for our ancestors.

Scolding Hok Yee as if he were a boy and not a grandfather, they told him we should not use new things to take the place of old.They commanded the destruction of the ghost machine and the orchard to bring back peace.

The branches of our Ponkan trees were heavy with fruit that would soon be ripe, fruit we’d already sold to pay for Oi Ling’s bride wealth and for Gim Gong’s wedding—turned funeral—banquet.

“At least give us a stay that will allow us to harvest the Ponkans,”Hok Yee pleaded.

Quick as lightning, Elder Brother said, “You would keep the whole village in peril just to fill your purse?”

The Council of Elders, agreeing the threat of another attack was too great, lectured Hok Yee on duty and ordered the trees cut without delay.

Of course, chopping down trees carries its own risk since the spirits in them can be offended.Before Hok Yee and Wai Seuk raised their axes,they apologized to our trees, asking pardon for the pain they would cause.

The trunks, thick as human necks, were not easily severed, however,and I felt each blow as if the ax were sinking into my flesh.

Our hill could not be cultivated.Neither could we sell it.Who would buy? Yet we had to pay taxes on the land.We had to pay for the fruit we’d been forced to destroy, wages for our guards and laborers, Gim Gong’s funeral rites.As the saying goes, succeeding is like a turtle climbing up a mountain; failing is like water running downhill.

No, we did not go hungry.But we had to sell most of the fields we’d bought during our few years of plenty.

Wai Seuk and Hok Yee blamed Gim Gong as much as Elder Brother:had Gim Gong not angered everyone with his talk, they said, Elder Brother would not have succeeded in fanning people’s jealousy into the typhoon that toppled our orchard.

Nor did I disagree.

And yet.

And yet, lying awake at night, turning over Gim Gong’s talk like a farmer turns soil, I began to wonder.Was he at fault, had he been wrong,as we believed? Or had he been a golden carp leaping upstream, scales shimmering in the sun, while the rest of us were catfish, willing to wallow in the mud at the river’s bottom?

“Open your ears and listen,” he had said.“You condemn foreign ghosts for their treatment of our people.But what about the suffering of our people here? Here in our own country.Our own country where we are ground under the iron heels of landlords and officials so that we cannot support our families except by leaving them to live and work among the ghosts you hate.”

Wasn’t that what my Yeh Yeh had said? “No matter how hard we work, we have as much chance of living well as a blind man has of catching an eel.”

That was why so many of our men had fallen prey to the pig traders,why they had to go overseas still.Because, in truth, nothing had changed for our people since Yeh Yeh had been forced to drink hot water though our family grew tea.

Sesame said that in school his teacher would unroll maps of our country whenever a student misbehaved.

“Look,” he would say.“See how the colors change year by year as our nation loses more and more land to foreign ghosts.If we are to be saved, we must throw them off.And how do we do this?”

“By practicing traditional virtues,” every student in the school had to answer.“By obeying without question.”

Gim Gong had urged the opposite.“We not only can change, we must.We must take the money from surplus harvests, the money you now borrow for funerals and weddings, and spend it on fertilizers, better seed,and improved tools that will bring advancement.”

Of course, spending on funerals and weddings is not money wasted but our obligation.But what about our surplus harvests? Should people,could people, really do something with a surplus other than convert it into coins, which can be buried? Or was that yet another foolish ghost idea? Or an idea that worked for them but not for us?

Where houses in Gold Mountain might have large windows at eye level, even on outer walls, as Gim Gong had claimed, we had to make the windows in our houses small and set them high beyond the reach of thieves.Where crops in Gold Mountain might safely ripen unguarded, our people had to arm themselves with knives and sticks and remain in the fields all through harvest to protect their grain and fruit from neighbors as well as strangers.Wasn’t that why we’d had to build the watchtower in our orchard and hire guards? Even then, neither tower nor guns had saved it.

No, only buried coins were safe.Anything else could be stolen.It would ever be thus so long as men like Elder Brother wielded power.And when people are unjustly treated, what can they do except endure?

SHEBA

DeLand, Florida

1889-1892

Directly I quit trying to stop a baby from coming, I gived in to my feelings for younguns, fussing over them every chance I got.Shucks, I was borrowing babies from their mamas just to feel them in my arms and on my hip.

Heisting a little chap onto my shoulders, I recollected how Aunt Mattie’d counseled my mama and daddy, “Bottom rail will rise to the top someday.” How Mama’d taken it for a comfort, Daddy a star to aim at.How my heart’d rise high as a flying African when Daddy swung me over his head, singing, “You the top rail.”

Back in our cabin, I dreamed out loud to Jim.“I want for our younguns to be top rails.”

Jim dropped down on the bench beside me.“There can’t never be no top rails without rails below, and that don’t make for good living.”

“Unless you the top rail.”

Jim shook his head.“You know during slavery I was tasked light and got meat stead of bones, pretty clothes stead of guano sacks—everything folks in quarters wanted for themselves and their younguns.I was top rail to them, and they hated me for it.Wasn’t for Uncle George, I’d been cold lonesome.”

I reached for his hand.“Them folks was meanly on account of slavery.”

“They was meanly on account of envy, envy what come from fences and top rails and bottom rails.” Jim took both my hands.Laughing, he pulled me onto his knees.“My wanting for our younguns is funning and loving.”

Lue, now, he was top rail to Miss Fanny and no mistake.Short to the time he come back to her, she bought a piece of land longside Miss Cynthia’s just for him.And when he fixed on clearing it for a grove, Miss Fanny couldn’t stand to see him straining his lungs out.She gived Jim wages over what he was drawing from Miss Cynthia to help Lue.

We was right glad of the cash.Jim liked to put by a little every month for the younguns we was hoping for, see.But we was keeping Grandma Maisie like we oughta, and without no rise in our wages for the longest,stretching out what we got was terrible hard.

Jim wasn’t the kind what waited for cash before helping a body,howsomever.He’d jumped in beside Lue from the get-go.Only Miss Fanny, she never knowed it.Staying close to the house, there was a heap she ain’t seen.And Lue wasn’t confidential with her.Fact is, cept for talking about plants, she and Lue was mighty quiet.

Mark it down, plants was what Lue prized over everything, and he asked Jim to learn him the signs colored folks go by.When he seen I could read the woods like he read books, he asked me to learn him that, too.

Bit by little bit, Jim told Lue about the signs his Uncle George’d told him.I showed Lue how to pick out roots and berries and herbs what was good eating—just like Aunt Mattie’d showed my mama what’d showed me.

Huh, Lue swallowed learning the way other folks swallow rations.He wasn’t a body what accepted everything he was told, mind.He never would try planting potatoes on dark nights.Or purge trees with Epsom salts.But he listened for the whooperwill before planting peas in Miss Fanny’s truck garden.He waited till dogwood was in bloom before planting corn.

I declare, he got so he could prophesy weather good as Jim: heavy dew for fair skies, red sunset for chill, whirlwind for dry.When Lue prophesied winters with bitter cold was coming, howsomever, that was from his own figuring, not signs.

Jim and me, we wasn’t settled in our minds over what to make of Lue’s prophecy.Miss Fanny, she told Lue he was right smart.And when he got a notion to make a better orange—one what’d come through a cold spell without being hurt—she crowed he was like his name in China talk:Gim Gong, Double Brilliance.

She was the only one singing praise.Growers scoffed Lue was thin-brained.Not just growers, neither.Snowbirds, Crackers, and Colored,they was all calling Lue a fool.Course they’d been against him from the day he come to DeLand.

Jim’d carried Miss Fanny to the station to fetch Lue.So Jim’d seen for himself how folks stretched their eyes when Lue jumped off the train shouting, “Mother Fanny.” And Sarah, what’d quit Miss Cynthia’s and was maid to Miss Fanny’s preacher, she said her white folks was red hot over a Chinaman calling a white woman mother.Shug and Ruth and Minty, their white folks put the blame on Lue.They—Shug and Ruth and Minty, I means—did too.Huh, they was buzzing and stinging worse than bees.

“That Chinaman above himself.”

“He got high ideas, all right.”

“What Lue hold high is our ways, Africa ways,” I cut in.“He look on us with respect.”

Jim called out to the hired mens what sweat and strained longside him and Lue.“Nate, Jethro, Ben, you seen how Lue is!”

“He too swelled up to eat with us.”

“He talk like white folks.”

“Act like them.”

“Only cause he got book learning,” Jim come back.

“He ain’t nothing like the Chinamens Old Master brung in,” Grandma Maisie said.“Lue small and yellow like them.But he ain’t got their freedom spirit.”

Louella, what was in slavery with Grandma Maisie, sucked her teeth.“Maybe he done cut it off with his hair.”

Folks was snappish, terrible snappish.But Lue never once put a bad mouth on them.Not to Miss Fanny.Not to Jim or me.There wasn’t no complaining in Lue, see.He swallowed his feelings the same as he swallowed learning.Even so, Misery was writ all over his face.

Well, Miss Fanny, she was falling down on her knees and calling for God to make white folks look kindly on Lue.When they stayed meanly,she told Lue white folks looked down on him on account he was too friendly with Jim and me.She told Lue he should be overseer over Jim.She even fixed it with Miss Cynthia.

I was pouring morning coffee for Lue and Miss Fanny when she started in, and I tell you, I was hard angry at her for overlooking Jim.Lue,seeing me fold my lips, picked at his napkin.Miss Fanny, she pressed on,making Lue her straw bossman for notifying Jim.

Now Lue wasn’t drawing no wages, so he got nothing of his own.He was relying on Miss Fanny for the chance to make his orange, for every little thing.But he spoke up for Jim.

I scarce heard Lue, he was speaking so soft.Miss Fanny took on something powerful anyways.She wasn’t wanting to hear no cross talk,soft or loud.No, not even from Lue.

Directly he recognized that, Lue gived in.

Jim, recalling how he was hated in slavery, made his calling down easy for Lue.Shrugging, he said, “That’s white folks for you.”

All the same, Lue dropped his head, studied the ground, and shuffled his feets.My eyes, they started watering.

“Hush,” Jim said.“Ain’t nothing changed.”

Fact is, howsomever, I’d recognized Miss Fanny got no feeling for nobody outside of Lue, I’d recognized she’d never keep a youngun safe for Jim and me.

SHEBA

DeLand, Florida

1895-1904

Miss Fanny never did recognize Jim or me as people.For all she held Lue high, she never gived him the freedom of a dog.Outside of his working in the grove and their hours of sleeping, she made him stay by her side.If he dragged even a speck when she crooked her finger at him, she’d pout out her lip to quicken his step.

But I believe in praising the bridge what carries a body over.So I got to tell you Miss Fanny did give Lue a chance to mess with plants any way he liked, and she took on his wanting to make a better orange like it was her own, straining longside him over books and papers on growing, talking with him hour by hour, fixing on trying one thing and then another.

Lue nursed his seedlings tender as a mama her younguns.Miss Fanny watched over them just as careful.When the first freeze come, she run out and bundled them in blankets like they was little chaps.And when it looked like the cold done killed the seedlings in the second freeze, she cried loud as Lue.

She was so enfeebled from trying to save them seedlings, she couldn’t get out of her bed.But did she call on the Lord to raise her up? No.She hollered for Him to make Lue’s seedlings rise.Lue, he was calling out the same.

Every day he was on his knees studying the ground.The morning he seen shoots pushing up from the seedlings’ roots, he danced a jig all across the grove and garden and up the stairs to Miss Fanny.She clapped her hands and sang, “Praise Jesus,” strong as folks at a shout.

Mark it down, that orange Lue’d fixed on making was dear as life to them both.Freedom was the thing dear to Jim.Chasing it, he’d cut loose from Master Alex.Still looking to grab it, he pushed for us to buy a patch on the other side of Miss Fanny.

I never did believe Jim could get it.Freedom, I means, not the land.The folks what was selling them four acres was running.I was fixing to run myself.Not a tree on that patch was living.We’d have to dig up every one, then get us new trees, set them out, and graft them when they was ready.

“How we going to do all that just working nights?” I fretted.“And another freeze’ll kill any new trees we plant.”

“You got to have faith,” Lue jumped in.“My family lost their land in a bad drought.But when I was back to see them, they’d a thousand-tree grove.”

“From what I seen, the Devil’s always outsmarting God,” I come back.

Jim pressed for me to give in to his wanting anyways, and while he was speaking, a heat come up in my face.First I thought Mama was near.Then I recognized the heat I was feeling was shame, shame cause I was coming at Jim like the folks what’d called Daddy down for striving at freedom.Mama’d said them folks was afraid of trouble.And Fear was woven into me all right, woven in too deep for me to throw off.Even so, I pulled up my grit and told Jim to buy the land.

Huh, Jim was laughing glad.Lue, he said, “I’ll help.” He did, too.He was like the magic hoe, bending his back for us, not only at night when we was there but afternoons while Jim was working in Miss Cynthia’s grove, I was in Miss Fanny’s kitchen, and Miss Fanny was sleeping.

One by one we dug up the dead trees and burned them.One by one we uprooted sour seedlings from the swamps and set them out, then grafted them with slips from Miss Cynthia’s best trees and Lue’s own special seedlings.We also planted cowpeas and velvet beans for green manure; beans, tomatoes, and corn to bring in cash.

Many a night we was so played out we could scarce lift a bucket or hoe between the three of us.When the Moon Regulator failed to bring on light, the onliest way we could water was by feeling our way from tree to tree, furrow to furrow.But Lue, he never wavered.

Laying by our first crop of oranges after seven long years sure was a big time for Jim and me, and we had us a gathering for sharing our happiness.I cooked a feast.Jim played his fiddle.We ate and sang and danced and shouted the night through.

Come cockcrow, Preacher beat the drum.Nate and Jethro rattled dry gourds.Jim and me asked for folks to honor Lue.Directly there was some growling.But Jim and me marched a circle round Lue anyways, shaking our hands and stamping our feets.Most folks followed, shouting and kicking up the dust.Lue, smiling ear to ear, turned red as the rising sun.

Now Lue never could’ve helped us cept Miss Fanny stayed ailing from the Big Freeze on, sleeping a heap and scarce rising from her bed.

Course she was old, and wasn’t nothing no doctor or nobody else could do about that.But I could’ve eased her cough with tansy in honey and her fevers with juice from mashed peach leaves.I could’ve settled her stomach with tea brewed from parched rice and bay leaves.Only she turned her face from everything cept what the doctor gived her.

Anyways, she got so poorly the doctor found her a waiting maid,Miss LaGette, to watch her day and night.That gal was trained up by the doctor himself, and she was right fine, never complaining when Miss Fanny got peppery.

Well, Miss Fanny lingered for the longest.The doctor, he was powerful surprised.Way I figured it, there couldn’t be no Diddy-Wah-Diddy for Miss Fanny without Lue in it, and she was fighting Death.

She was too enfeebled to win, howsomever, and come the time she sunk real low, Miss LaGette got scared about being alone with her nights while Lue was in his cabin and Jim and me was at our own place.So she asked her sister, Miss Eleanora, to stop with her.

When Miss LaGette sent Miss Eleanora down to tell me Miss Fanny’d sat up and asked for my fried chicken and cornbread, I knowed her time was near, and I called Lue in for saying goodie-bye.

“It’s good Miss Fanny wants to eat,” he laughed.“I’ll get you a chicken.”

“No.Go to Miss Fanny.It ain’t her but Death what’s asking to be fed.”

Come nightfall, she was dead.Lue started in weeping like Miss Fanny was his mama.But I was too embittered in my feelings to grieve for her.Jim never shed no tears for Miss Fanny, neither.He did go tell the trees she was dead so they wouldn’t rot, mind.I set Miss LaGette and Miss Eleanora to turning all the pictures in the house to the wall and stopping the clocks so they wouldn’t run to nothing.Then I done the laying out.That was how I seen Miss Fanny foam at the mouth during the washing and knowed she’d died without speaking her mind.

Yes, she called out plenty to God, “Take care of Lue.Take care of my Lue.” But she never did help the Lord none by writing out a will or nothing.Fact is, Miss Fanny ain’t looked out for Lue any more than my mama’s Old Master looked out for Grandma Sue.

Aunt Mattie said Old Master’d promised to free Grandma Sue, see.Mama, too.Only he never gived nobody a paper to show it.Aunt Mattie reckoned that’s why folks smelled Old Master’s soul prowling round the plantation, giving them the cold chills worse than when he was alive.Cause wouldn’t God or the Devil take him in.

At[10] the start of every year， Lue’d get himself a big notebook.Late at night—or in the early hours of morning—I’d see him at the table near the window of his cabin， scratching a pen across the pages， filling them one by one.

First time I seen him crouched there was the morning after he’d come back to Miss Fanny.He looked so terrible sad, I made up a pot of the tea he’d brung her, carried it over to him, and poured out a cup.

Lue wrapped his hands round it like he was cold and breathed in the steam.

“What you writing?” I asked just for something to say.

He spoke so soft, all I heard was “spilling my heart.” Well, I couldn’t catch the meaning of that.But I recognized from my own trouble dreams some devilment was riding him.So I gone on, trying to drag him out of that lonesome valley like Grandma Maisie done with me.

He sipped at the tea, saying nothing.After a spell, I seen Miss Fanny’s light go on.She wasn’t one what waited quiet if I was late getting her tea, so I run back to the kitchen.

Looking over at his cabin, I seen Lue’d picked up his pen and started in writing again.

Turning Lue’s words over and studying them out in my mind, I figure a body’d have to read them notebooks of his to know his deep heart feelings, cause he never did talk a heap to folks cept about plants.The orange he was striving after, say.Or the garden he’d made when he was a little chap.Or the water buffalo his people use for plowing stead of mules.He did talk lively and long about them.

There was a few times he let loose something confidential after Jim and me cultivated a friendship with him.Like when we was setting out our trees? He let slip his folks’d lost their thousand-tree grove on account he run from them.And once, when Jim and me was funning together, he looked at us mournful and groaned he ain’t done right by the gal he run from, and his people hated him like poison.Minute we said anything back,howsomever, he blew on us cold.

He never said nothing confidential about Miss Fanny or her sisters to us, neither.Not ever.So I can tell you on every anniversary of Miss Fanny’s passing, Lue’d send a blanket of her favorite Cape Jasmine to Miss Cynthia and Miss Phoebe to set on her grave, and he’d make up a box of his best oranges for them as well.But whether he sent them cause he stayed faithful spite of their treating him worse than awful or cause he never recognized them for what they is, that I can’t rightly say.

Anyways, Lue and Miss LaGette both took Miss Fanny north for burial.After the send-off, Miss LaGette, figuring her service to Miss Fanny was over, went back to her folks.Lue stayed on like he done every summer.

His letters to Jim was the same as always， asking about the horses and his special trees.But Miss LaGette’d told me Miss Cynthia was bothered over Lue voting when she could not.[11] And Sally—that gal what cooked for the shoe man， Mr.Sampson—she heard talk about that other sister，Miss Phoebe.How she ain’t never got over Lue coming back to Miss Fanny stead of sticking it out as a preacher to his people.

I reckon everybody what worked for a snowbird from North Adams knowed neither one of Miss Fanny’s sisters was partial to Lue.And when the snowbirds come back down that winter, they was buzzing, saying Lue was selling—they called it stealing—berries and vegetables out of the sisters’ garden.

Jim figured Lue must’ve run out of cash money, and we sent him some of our own, making out it was owed Miss Fanny.Back come a letter saying he was right glad of the cash and he’d be late returning on account of “business.”

Piecing together a story here and a whisper there, I suspicioned the“business” was making a claim for Miss Fanny’s property.But with Miss Fanny gone, Miss Cynthia and Miss Phoebe showed their real feelings,telling Lue he got no rights since he wasn’t true blood kin.Shucks, they must’ve pressed that man till he feared he was going to lose the chance to finish making his orange and have to start over from the stump.There ain’t no other reason he’d have tried storying, giving the sisters what he said was Miss Fanny’s will.

Lue’s hand and hers was real close, mind.But Miss Cynthia was sharp, sharp and flinty.She seen right off the paper was false.That put a fire in her belly, and she sent for her cousin, Mr.Darby, to run Lue off.

Always before Lue’d talked humble to them.This time he ain’t slinked away like they expect.Stead, he told them stout and he told them strong if he wasn’t no kin, the family owed him fifteen years’ back wages.

Course they liked to have had a fit, and they dragged up all what Miss Fanny done for him.

“What about your passage back from China?” Miss Cynthia said.

Miss Phoebe done point at the things Lue’d brung from China, the things he was spozed to sell and never could.“You bought these goods with Miss Fanny’s money.”

“There’s also your years of free lessons,” Mr.Darby told him.“All your doctor bills, too.”

They was on him like white on rice.But Lue, he just turned his back on the lot of them, walked to the open window, and folded his hands in prayer.

“O Lord,” he called out so people in the street turned their heads to stare.“O Lord, you know these people are unfair.Praise Jesus I’m not a sinner like them.”

Miss Cynthia, about to bust, sent Mr.Darby to fetch their lawyer.Minute he was out the door, the sisters say, Lue flew at them with a knife.

Huh, Lue was so gentle he wouldn’t poke out a razorback sow what broke under his cabin for giving birth and set fleas jumping up through the floorboards something awful.He never would set out traps for mice,neither.And if Miss Fanny’s horses stopped while he was driving them?He never did ply no whip.He got down from the surrey or wagon or whatever they was hitched to and fed them lumps of sugar till they was willing to start up again.

Tell me, would a man like that pull a knife on two old womens? And if he did, would those womens have gived Lue their property in DeLand and twelve thousand dollars besides?

Yes, Lue did win what he was wanting—the chance to finish making his orange.And Jim and me, we got our two-room house, a right fine grove, brood sow, and passel of chickens, so we figured we could breathe along on our own the way Jim been wanting.

Like the old people say, howsomever, watch out when you get all you want, fattening hogs ain’t in luck.

SHEBA

DeLand, Florida

1904-1915

Lue was powerful cut up.But he pushed down his grieving and throwed himself into his work, spinning ideas with Jim like he’d done with Miss Fanny.

When Lue tasked himself to make a better grapefruit top of finishing his orange, Jim was right there working longside him.And when Lue made his orange, Jim laughed, “You got Double Brilliance like your China name, all right.Maybe triple.”

Yes, Lue made his orange.He did.And it turned out just the way he dreamed.The tree don’t look a heap different from most—it got a well-rounded head and low-spreading branches.But the fruit, the fruit is something else—a fair size, full of juice, and tasty.It ain’t got many seeds and is a good keeper and shipper.It ripen late in the season, too, at a time when oranges is few and the price high.Best of all, it’s hardy, hanging on to a tree through winter cold and summer rain without hurting none.

Well, nurserymens was always sniffing round groves looking for something new, and there was one what got eyes sharper than the rest.Huh,his eyes bulged big as fists over Lue’s orange.

“You give me the budwood to raise,” that nurseryman said, “I’ll name the orange Lue Gim Gong.I’ll make you famous in Florida, in America,and all the world.Famous and rich.”

Mark it down, that nurseryman poured it on, promising the moon with a fence round it.Lue’s eyes, they got to shining bright as when he was pulling candy with Miss LaGette.He wouldn’t hear no contrary word from Jim or me.

“Yes,” Lue told the nurseryman.“Yes.”

While the nurseryman was yet raising the Lue Gim Gong trees, he put the orange up for a big prize.It won, too, just short to the time the trees was ready for selling.Yes, a big medal.One called the Wilder for best new fruit of the year.

Nineteen and eleven that was, a date I won’t soon forget.The nurseryman made sure news of the medal got floated round good, and Lue was writ up in newspapers and magazines everywhere.One look at them,Jim say, and you can see clear how plain folks, big growers, and powerful government men all was buzzing.

I tell you, they was calling the orange “a marvel,” “rare and good,”Lue “a genius,” “a plant wizard,” and more.Fact is, they bragged so big the wanting for Lue Gim Gongs caught and spread quicker than a fire.

People from all over the world commenced to send Lue letters, and his grove spilled over with folks coming to make admiration over him and his orange.Them river excursion boats even made his place into a stop.

Lue put out a book for people visiting to sign their names, and Jim counted more than two thousand in a single year.That don’t include younguns, neither—the ones what come with their folks or with teachers what brung their classes.

Lord, how Lue prized them visitors.For the longest, he ain’t had nobody cept Jim and me, laborers, and scalawags.Now even them Yankees what’d called Lue down come smiling like they’d never parted ways.

Well, I tell you straight and I tell you bold, I hold what Master William, the KK, and that turpentine captain done to my daddy against them still.But Lue, he was a forgiving man.Them Yankees done licked his spirit raw as the whip what laid open my daddy’s feets.Even so, Lue spoke kind to them.He spoke kind to everyone.

Anyways, people coming to visit made Lue powerful glad.I declare,he’d be welcoming them at his gate before they’d a chance to ring his bell.

Course everybody was in a almighty hurry for a close look at the Lue Gim Gong.But Lue’d take his time getting to the mother trees, stopping to show folks the way he done his grafting or how he use palmetto roots and cuttings for fertilizer.If there was a heap of younguns, he’d draw them down to Round Pond and show them how the fish jump up and eat out of his hand.He’d call out March, the rooster he’d saved from a chicken hawk and raised for a pet.He’d tell them stories about coming up in China.

Way after a while, he’d get to his Lue Gim Gong trees.But he’d not let on.No, he’d point a distance to oranges from other trees what’d dropped to the ground on account of rain or cold.Then he’d remark on how there was no droppings under the tree he was standing by, draw himself up right tall, and say, “This is the Lue Gim Gong.”

Now Lue Gim Gong oranges can hold on after ripening while the tree blossoms and bears new fruit.So Lue’d have one-year, two-year,three-year oranges hanging on the same trees.Only he’d know their age,and he’d cut off a sampling of each kind, then lead people to his“cathedral.”

That was what Lue got to calling his prayer garden, see.He’d planted wild yellow jasmine and Cherokee roses at his south fence so the smell from them’d spill into where he was praying.He’d let the branches of the trees grow so thick, they kept out all but the heaviest rain.Jim done made some benches and set them front of the orange-crate pulpit, and Lue’s visitors, they’d crowd onto these and sit more hushed than if they was in a real church.

Soon as they was settled, Lue’d stand at his pulpit and offer up a prayer for every good a body could want.Then he’d call on six people to come up and stand them in a circle facing the crowd.When they was set,he’d cut open the Lue Gim Gongs one at a time and hand the six people sections to taste.

Always they’d smile and fuss over the orange being juicy, free of seeds, and sweet.Always they’d make over the last piece most.Lue’d let them go on for a bit.Then he’d tell them the last orange was the one what been hanging for three years, and everybody’d clap their hands and ask him how he done it.

Just like a preacher giving a sermon, Lue’d start in on how people from countries all over the world come to America looking for gold.

Yes, somebody’d call out.In her home country, she’d believed the leaves of the trees here was gold and people only got to go into the woods and pull off armfuls of golden leaves to buy anything they wanted.

Directly, somebody else’d say he was told people in America could just hit rocks with a stick and rum’d come spilling out.

By and by, Lue’d come back with how he’d aimed for learning, not gold or rum or whatever else people been saying.How he wanted to do good with his learning.That was how he’d come to dream of making his orange.“The rest was work.Hard work.”

Sometimes folks’d call out their dreams.Dreams they’d made true.Dreams they’d gived up.Had Lue ever been disencouraged, they’d want to know.

Yes, he’d tell them.But he’d called on the Lord to give him faith.And the Lord done answered his prayers, holding him up when he was down and guiding him to the finish.

Lue was preaching all right.The white folks, they was hanging to his every word.It was a sight to see.And the change their admiration made in Lue was the same as between hail and sunshine.He swelled right proud.He never did put on airs, mind.But he got all lit up, and there was a pertness to his walk.

Visitors left with the sun, howsomever.And they never did invite Lue to worship at their churches.There was no invitations to their homes,neither.When Lue called on folks anyways, they ain’t turned him away like before.But nobody asked him in to a house.Few offered refreshment,even a glass of cool water.Most they’d generally do is come out on their porches to visit.

Lue was like that Conjure Man from Africa, see, the one what run from his slavers in Georgia and joined up with the Indians here in Florida.Made himself a good life too—till the government sent soldiers to drive the Indians off their lands.

Course Conjure Man and the Indians fought the soldiers, fought them fierce and fought them smart.But there was a heap more soldiers than Indians.And the government was mighty powerful, too powerful for the Indians and Conjure Man.

Those people the soldiers ain’t killed the government done drove out of their homes and out of the Territory.Cept Conjure Man.

When the soldiers come for him, the wind was blowing rash and the moon shining dim.Conjure Man, slipping in and out of the shadows, led the soldiers a fine chase.Then he changed into a alligator and slid,laughing, into Lake Belle.

Wasn’t long before he quit his laughing, howsomever, cause having the shape of a alligator is not the same as being a alligator, and Conjure Man got terrible lonesome.He is lonesome still.Nights you hear bellowing from the lake, you is hearing him cry.

Lue cried in the night, too.